We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Corpse Whale
Product Description A self-proclaimed “vessel in which stories are told from time immemorial,” poet dg nanouk okpik seamlessly melds both traditional and contemporary narrative, setting her apart from her peers. The result is a collection of poems that are steeped in the perspective of an Inuit of the twenty-first century—a perspective that is fresh, vibrant, and rarely seen in contemporary poetics.Fearless in her craft, okpik brings an experimental, yet poignant, hybrid aesthetic to her first book, making it truly one of a kind. “It takes all of us seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling to be one,” she says, embodying these words in her work. Every sense is amplified as the poems, carefully arranged, pull the reader into their worlds. While each poem stands on its own, they flow together throughout the collection into a single cohesive body.The book quickly sets up its own rhythms, moving the reader through interior and exterior landscapes, dark and light, and other spaces both ecological and spiritual. These narrative, and often visionary, poems let the lives of animal species and the power of natural processes weave into the human psyche, and vice versa.Okpik’s descriptive rhythms ground the reader in movement and music that transcend everyday logic and open up our hearts to the richness of meaning available in the interior and exterior worlds. From Booklist In her captivating debut, Inuit poet okpik creates a world both prehistoric and contemporary, part boreal forest, part bestiary of the half-imagined, filled with caribou and rhubarb, mastodon tracks, snowberries, and demon flowers. Okpik litters this landscape with soda bottles and oil slicks and alludes to psychology and DNA, vital concerns for a poet who is so interested in ideas of historical space and self-identity. Perhaps for this reason, okpik’s speaker refers to herself always as “she/I,” a disorienting approach that results in less a hazy dream-state than a crisp hallucination encompassing the smoky spell of a mendicant’s intoxicant and the interrupting edges of cairn rocks and shark teeth. Okpik’s use of Inuit vocabulary and her gift for unconventional poetic arrangement on the page interweave to create a primordial cyberspace, a surreal world through which the estranged speaker navigates disintegrating glaciers, blue floes, white space. And there is always a human spirit underlying the ice and hiding between silver birch and elderberry, invoking her ancestry, steering by the polestar. --Diego Báez Review "In Corpse Whale, okpik has layered old Inuit land knowledge with an old English-language poetic mode to form something wholly new. . . . an invigorating read."—Terrain.org "Unlike poets who adopt cultures into which they weren't born, or raised, okpik, who has fished the waters of which she writes so eloquently, has something rare these days: an authentic voice, one that nets ancient beliefs without disgarding modern science or the daily news."—Poetica “Corpse Whale is a refreshing departure from many of the tropes we see in contemporary poetry. It is an emotive illumination into a corner of the world we so rarely get a glimpse of. Intimate and storied, okpik’s work ushers us into a new poetic topography that is both imaginative and necessary.”—Matthew Shenoda, author of Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone “dg okpik’s remarkable prowess in literary composition, in curating silence and space, presents a vessel of breath ripe with a singing, resonant and clear. Suspended with an undercurrent, a waving future steeped in thawing history gleaned for immediacy, a presence, [okpik’s poetry] is incredibly impressive and mindfully engaging. This book is a wave of consciousness from an extraordinary human being bringing us home. Nothing like it before, now suddenly essential, like an earthquake uproots soapstone, a part of us was always here, and okpik insists we relax into it and feel this flow. Fall in, don’t look back. You need this. You
